The Risen (11 page)

“And how much would you tell her about
us
being out there?” I replied. “You know, Bill, I can tell Leslie some things the next time she calls. I might beat you to the phone or maybe call Leslie myself, or write her a letter. Or maybe Ligeia and I can write a letter together. Ligeia might even mention that compared to me you're not even that good.”

The truck's engine idled. I felt the vibration in the soles of my shoes. I knew my brother was waiting for
me to tell him, Hey, I'm just kidding about Leslie, or maybe say that he was right and I shouldn't go to Panther Creek anymore. But I didn't say a word.

“Okay.” Bill sighed. “But if you drive out there, you know you can't drink as much. If you were to get caught driving drunk . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, but just because you don't want a good time doesn't mean I can't have one, and that goes for Ligeia too, because I'm not afraid to get her what she likes.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bill asked.

“Nothing,” I said, realizing my mistake even in the alcohol haze. “I give her beads and stuff, and she likes them. That's all I mean.”

I switched on the radio and turned up the volume. Bill waited a few more moments and then put the truck in gear. We drove on through town to the house. As we pulled into the driveway, he reached for my arm.

“You wouldn't do that, call Leslie or write her,” he asked, “or let Ligeia know her address?”

“No, but like Ligeia says, I'm a lot better at screwing than you. That's something you'd better not let Leslie know, else she might decide to sleep on the couch with me next time she's here.”

That will do it,
I told myself as Bill's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Pain isn't so intense when you're drunk. That was my second thought.

“You're drunk,” he said. “If you weren't . . .”

Bill got out of the truck and slammed the door. He didn't go into the house but started walking toward town. Afraid of what he might do to me if he lost control, or what I might do to him.

My mother was in the kitchen but I went straight to my bedroom, locked the door, and lay down, the bed wavering like a compass needle. When it finally steadied, I lay on my back and grinned at the ceiling. Then I spoke my thoughts out loud:
My brother is jealous of me. My brother is afraid of me.

I
take a left on Walnut Street, knowing this way I'll come to a coffee shop before a bar. My waitress wears the piercings and tattoos that are de rigueur for servers in Asheville. I face the window and sip my coffee, after a while order a sandwich. I've whittled an hour off my wait before I leave and walk to Pritchard Park. I watch a few not-so-covert drug deals, the drift of the homeless from one park corner to another, never venturing beyond. They resemble birds I saw once in a zoo, their only cage surrounding darkness, though here the darkness comes from within.

The long-term drunks are easily spotted—the gray-clay look of the drowned, short thin-ice steps learned
from too many slips and falls. I guess which have a college education, once-promising careers. I pick out several, one because of his posture, another who acts ashamed he's here, and a third, who glares back at me contemptuously.
I know your story too
, his eyes seem to say,
and I find it tedious
.

Six months before the wreck, I was charged with drunk driving while returning from a bar in Waynesville. I'd worked out a ritual so as not to get caught—order a sixteen-ounce coffee with my last drink, to be more alert but also to cloak the whiskey. Chewing gum was a tip-off. The most important thing was to offset the alcohol by driving five miles under the speed limit, slower but not slow enough to draw attention. No radio or CD playing either. I focused between the center and roadside lines and looked at nothing else. It had worked until a traffic stop one night. The trooper asked me to take a Breathalyzer test and when I refused, a roadside test, which I thought, wrongly, I could pass.

Kay had called Bill and he'd paid my bail and brought me home. The three of us talked at the kitchen table while Sarah slept in her bedroom. An “intervention,” that was the term just starting to be used for such con
versations. Bill suggested AA meetings and Kay agreed. An overreaction, I argued, but promised no more drinking and driving and no more alcohol on weekdays.
If it happens again
, Kay said,
Sarah and I are leaving
.

So I'd learned my lesson. I drank at home and only on weekends, though weekends soon included Thursday and Sunday nights. One such evening Sarah was at a school play rehearsal. The director was sick and ended practice after thirty minutes. Kay's Sierra Club meeting wouldn't be finished until eight thirty. “I'm outside and it's cold, Dad,” Sarah had complained. I got there fine, but Sarah wanted to talk about the play on the ride back. Maybe that was the difference, because a mile from home I didn't stay between the lines.

I only dislocated my shoulder, but Sarah's forehead was cut and her leg so badly broken a trooper blanched when he saw it. I watched as the medics inflated a plastic brace around the leg and carefully laid her onto a gurney. I told them to take her to Mission in Asheville, not Waynesville, and to have the hospital contact Dr. Matney. I kept demanding it even as the trooper snapped handcuffs on my wrists.

“You look like you might need something,” a voice says.

A long-haired young man, probably still in his twenties, has left the park and sidled up beside me. Despite the day's warmth he wears a camo jacket. He opens the pocket closest to me and I see an amber-tinted prescription vial.

“No, thanks,” I answer.

I turn and walk down to Malaprop's, browse the shelves to kill some time. I see a nice new edition of
You Can't Go Home Again
and open it, but I can't focus enough to make the splotches of ink have any meaning, so return the book to the shelf and walk back down Walnut Street. When I come to the Wolfe house, I step onto the porch and sit in one of the rocking chairs. I think of Thomas Wolfe and how he would have witnessed his older brother's body being brought onto this porch and down the steps. I wonder how Wolfe's portrait would differ if Ben had lived. What negative traits, so present in portrayals of his other siblings, might he have added?

I try to recall more about that late-September evening when my brother returned. He took a shower, but was it a long shower? Was there a residue of dirt, perhaps blood, on the shower tile or bathroom sink? And the next morning, scratches on his hands or neck
if not on his face? What of Bill's pocketknife? Had it been replaced or “lost”? But if I'd once noticed such things, nothing remains.
Nothing but remains,
according to the newspaper.
S
uch appalling blankness in that word; even
bones
allows some visual connection, something that at least can be imagined.

I TAKE THE ROUNDABOUT
way back to Bill's office. It's a sunny day, so the street musicians are out, playing with varying degrees of competence everything from Earl Scruggs to Mozart. As I come up Church Street I pass a vintage record store. Music from Asheville's classic rock station plays inside. Some memories are heard before envisioned, so I sit on a bench and listen. The first song is too recent for me to recognize, then “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers. It is the third song that triggers memory, not of Bill but of the afternoon Ligeia brought the joint.

“Hold the smoke in as long as you can,” she'd said, and handed it to me.

I did what she said, trying not to cough. I drank from the pint of whiskey, one burn following another.

“Deep, babe,” she said.

I took three more draws. Ligeia rubbed the ash off with a finger and relit what was left.

“Open your mouth,” she said, and raised the joint, inhaled, then leaned so the smoke passed into my mouth. I held it in as long as I could and exhaled, the gray-white smoke suspended between us briefly before dissipating.

“That should get you off,” Ligeia said, and nodded at the Quaalude and Dexedrine packets. “Thanks for getting all that for me.”

She swallowed some whiskey and grimaced.

“It takes getting used to, doesn't it?”

“It's not so bad,” I said, and, taking the bottle from her. I held the whiskey in my mouth a few moments and then swallowed. “Where does the bootlegger live?”

“You'll dig this,” Ligeia said. “He's on the same road as the church Angie and me go to.”

“Norman West Road?”

“Yeah, it's on the left, just a few houses before you get to the church. There's a silver horse trailer in the side yard.”

“I'll get the whiskey next time,” I said.

“And more of these?” Ligeia asked, nodding at the Dexedrine packets.

“Maybe I can get a couple,” I answered, “but the Quaaludes and Valium, if I take any more of those . . .”

“Look for Librium then. It's downer too.”

“All right,” I answered.

“School starts two weeks from Monday, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Ligeia said. “I never thought I'd get my kicks at school but I'll be freer there than at Uncle Hiram's place. Aunt Cazzie hardly leaves the house except to buy groceries. I'm out in the barn every day, smoking up my profits, just to keep from going completely nuts. Speaking of which, do you feel that pot buzz yet?”

As soon as she said it, I did. Everything shifted closer and then farther away.
One pill makes you larger
,
and one pill makes you small
, I told myself, then said the words aloud.

“‘And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all,'” Ligeia added. “That's a great song, isn't it?”

“Groovier than groovy,” I said, grinning. “That show I listen to played it again last week
. ‘
Feed your head.' That's how it ends.”

“Yes, ‘feed your head.'”

We chanted the words to each other, like a mantra, until Ligeia stood up and motioned toward the creek.

“Come on, let's get in the water.”

I took another swallow of whiskey and stood. The world swirled around me. It was like a carousel ride, except I was on the carousel and watching it at the same time. On the bank Ligeia took off her bikini top and bottom. She waded in until her pale breasts bobbed. Unlike where Bill and I swam, this pool was surrounded with more laurel than trees. Sunlight dazzled the pool's surface and for a few moments I believed that Ligeia's lower body shimmered in silver scales, and that she was summoning me to follow her downstream, back to her magical ocean kingdom.

I removed my cutoffs and waded in, but the pool's wider sky brought with it a sensation of vulnerability. What I'd felt in June came back now, but more intensely. I knew I was being watched, if not by Grandfather then by a policeman or game warden. I looked upstream and Bill wasn't there.
No,
I thought.
He didn't come today, and it's because he knew what was going to happen.

“What's wrong, babe?” Ligeia asked.

“Somebody's watching us,” I said, splashing to the bank and jerking on my cutoffs. “They know we've got drugs and they're going to arrest us.”

Ligeia came out of the water and we stood still and
listened. The only sound was a woodpecker's
tap-tap-tap
near the road. No, I thought, it's not a woodpecker, it's someone using that sound as a signal.

“There's no one else here, Eugene,” Ligeia said, holding my hand as she led me back to the quilt. “Lay down and close your eyes. Listen, babe, sometimes pot can do this. In a minute or two you'll be okay. I promise.”

She settled behind me and placed her arm over my stomach and pulled closer, her bare breasts against my back, knees and thighs touching mine. After a few minutes I felt better, but I'd confirmed what I'd never doubt again, that despite all the songs celebrating pot, my drug was the old-fashioned one. And now I knew where I could get it for myself, and I would.

FEED YOUR HEAD,
Grace Slick wails a last time and the final drum cymbal fades from inside the record store and the song is over. But then the song is not over, in my head at least, because a line of verse scalds like a cattle brand:

And the red queen's off with her head

W
hen I look back on the summer of 1969, I marvel at how unconnected Sylva seemed from the rest of the United States. To young people raised on the Internet, it would be unimaginable. A boy from Sylva had been killed in Vietnam, another badly injured, but the war never felt
within
our world. Neither did the antiwar movement in Berkeley, the civil rights protests spilling into violence in Louisville and New York, or the killings of Sharon Tate and her friends in California. We saw these events on WLOS in Asheville, the sole TV station we could pick up, but drained to black and white and behind glass, it was if we peered into a telescope at some alien world.

So little changed in Sylva. As they had since my earliest memory, the same stores stood on Main Street, and what was inside varied little. The smallest things had their assigned place. If I went into Pike's Drugstore, candy bars were in front of the counter, comic books on a wire rack to the right. Winkler's Restaurant had the same menu year after year, the same food served on the same green plates. A few things might change, a new brand of sunglasses at Dodd's general store, some bell-bottom jeans at Harris Clothing, but these anomalies, like the first cracks in a house's foundation, went unnoticed.

A willed innocence masking the world's injustice and evil, even the town's name a nostalgic turning away from reality, some might say. There would be some truth in such a view, but Sylva's residents needn't look beyond their own town to know injustice and evil. As Sheriff Loudermilk noted, small towns have a way of giving up their secrets.

Some, however, are not given up, one of which was why Shirley had worked for my grandfather three decades when most of his nurses rarely lasted a year. She never questioned what he asked her to do, which included telling patients to their faces that Dr. Matney
refused to treat them. She'd seen his temper, his bullying, and at times surely endured it, though strangely enough, I can't recall witnessing such a moment. Nor can I remember a single instance when she questioned what he asked or did. Even that one seeming act of defiance—stabbing the needle in her own arm—could be seen as an act of submission. The abuse of Bill and me hadn't been challenged, instead, partially absorbed. I do know that Shirley had eloped when still a teenager and returned to town five years later with a nursing degree but no wedding band. She'd moved back into the same house she'd fled and lived there with her mother, and when her mother died, Shirley lived there alone. What had happened during those five years was unknown. No one, including her parents, had received a phone call, telegram, or letter. I had been at her funeral, and the town gossips were still wondering. But the consequences of that return were clear. In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment. Maybe Shirley believed so too, and that Grandfather was that punishment.

When I awoke on Monday morning, I had to cover my head to avoid any piercing shard of light. Had I
not felt so bad I'd have been more alert, because Bill watched me closely since my drunken “I'm not afraid to get her what she likes” comment. Grandfather and Bill were with a patient and Shirley on the phone when I went into the hall and opened the closet door. I stuffed a Librium packet into my pocket and was reaching for some Desoxyn when Bill's hand clamped my wrist.

“You come with me,” he hissed, pulling me through the reception room and out the front door.

Bill was about to drag me into the side yard, but stopped when he heard the rasp of Nebo's razor.

“I'd hoped that was just drunken bluster,” Bill said in a fierce whisper. “How many times have you gotten something out of there?”

“What's it to you?” I answered. “You did it.”

“I did it once,
once
. How often, Eugene?”

“Take your hand off me,” I said.

Bill did, but stayed close to keep his voice low.

“Tell me, damn it.”

“Every week after the time you did it,” I answered, rubbing my stinging wrist.

“Every week,” Bill said, shaking his head. “What is wrong with you? I told you we couldn't do that.”

“Maybe I'm tired of you making the rules.”

“It's not about rules,” Bill hissed. “If those packets get traced back to Grandfather's office, it won't be just him knowing, which is bad enough, the law will be involved.”

“Don't get so bent out of shape,” I said.

“Are you listening to me? If the SBI only
suspects
we are involved, our futures—”

“
Our
futures?” I interrupted. “Don't you mean yours? You're freaking out because you're scared it might keep you out of med school.”

“Not could, would,” Bill said, stepping closer, his face inches from mine. “I've worked my ass off at Wake Forest three years to get into Bowman Gray, and if you think I'm going to let anyone screw that up, you're wrong.”

The office door opened and Shirley came out to tell Bill our grandfather needed him. He nodded and Shirley went back inside.

“Damn it, Eugene,” my brother said, grasping my arm. “Don't do it again. Do you understand?”

“Sure, William,” I said.

“You know, I've tried to be . . .”

Bill let go of my arm.

“But you will,” he said resignedly, and went back into the office.

The next morning Grandfather stepped onto shattered glass when he entered his private office. A windowpane was broken and the paint chipped where someone had tried to jimmy the wooden frame. At lunchtime Nebo came in with a power drill and installed a Corbin brass padlock on the closet door.

“Even if some son of a bitch does break in, he's not getting into that closet,” Grandfather told us and pocketed the key. “That's probably what it is, some welfare deadbeat stealing drugs. I hope he tries again, because Nebo's spending the night in here for a while.”

“SO YOU WON'T BE ABLE
to get in the closet again?” Ligeia asked the following Sunday.

“He's got a lock on it and there's only one key.”

She sat beside me on the quilt, hands clasped around her knees, the empty Quaalude packet beside the pint of whiskey I'd bought from the same bootlegger Angie used. He didn't know who I was, and when he asked I said a friend of Angie's, which was enough to elicit a
grunt and disappearance into his house. He came back with a bottle and I paid him
. Don't you come at daylight no more,
he'd told me.
I ain't exactly selling you kids sno-cones
.

“But I can get plenty of this,” I said, picking up the bottle and taking a swallow. “Next time I'll bring two pints. We can still get loaded.”

Ligeia looked toward the stream, then spoke.

“I think it's a sign.”

“What kind of sign?”

“A sign that summer's over,” she answered. “Time for us to move on, right? It's been groovy, but ‘ob-la-di ob-la-da life goes on.' Besides, Angie and her buddies are starting to help me deal. They're all seniors and when school starts next week I'll be hanging out with them.”

“So this was just because I got you drugs?” I asked. I turned my head and stared at the creek. When Ligeia touched my shoulder, I slid out of reach, only then looking at her.

“No,” Ligeia said, her blue eyes meeting mine. “Making it with you, it's been good. But you are just a kid.”

“I'm just a year and a half younger than you.”

“Only on a calendar, babe,” Ligeia said.

She moved closer and kissed me on the mouth, a long, lingering kiss.

I reached to untie her top, but she took my hand away. I must have looked like I was about to cry, because then, very softly, she said, “Okay, one last time,” and reached back and undid the ties herself.

I thought she might change her mind, so I went to Panther Creek at two o'clock the following Sunday. I sat by the pool and waited, the bootleg whiskey lowering in the bottle as did the sun in the darkening sky. It was my first time drinking alone and two epiphanies came to me. The first was that I was a tragic young swain fallen upon Shelley's “thorns of life.” I outgrew that particular bit of sentimentality, but not the second epiphany: true intimacy with alcohol was best achieved alone.

Then school started back.

Ligeia's classes were mostly in the vocational wing, so I saw her only at her locker or during our overlapping lunch periods. Back then our high school allowed students to smoke as long as they did so on the grass outside the cafeteria. When I went to lunch the first day, Ligeia was outside with Angie Wellbeck and a couple of other girls, who, unlike Ligeia, wore heavy makeup. Their
lipstick left pink rings around their cigarette butts. The rest of the smokers were males, the rough types who got suspended for cursing and fighting. They flicked burning matches at each other and threw elbows, their laughter aggressive, edged.

I sat where I could watch Ligeia through the cafeteria window. One of the guys came in and made a call on the pay phone. When he went back out, he and his buddies huddled with Ligeia and Angie. One of them saw me watching. He snuffed out his cigarette and came into the cafeteria.

“What the fuck are you looking at, asswipe?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled.

“Well, sit over there,” he said, shoving my tray to the opposite end, “and look at
nothing
from another direction.”

I risked covert glances though, and lingered near her locker between classes. If she saw me, she smiled but didn't speak. On the Monday of our third week, however, Ligeia waited outside my homeroom. She looked worried.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, and led me to a corner. “I'm still your favorite mermaid, right?”

“Yes,” I answered, feeling a surge of hope.

“How about trying again to get me some speed?” Ligeia asked. “Maybe you can get the key or something.”

“Grandfather carries the key in his pocket.”

“Then maybe there are some samples somewhere else, like in his desk?”

“He locks it too.”

“It's important,” she said, greater urgency in her voice. “I think I'm in trouble.”

“I can help you with money.”

“How much?”

“I can get you fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars won't get me out of this kind of trouble, Eugene. What about all that money in the bank? Isn't there some way you can get to it?”

“Grandfather has to co-sign. He'd make me tell him what it was for.”

“You could lie,” Ligeia said.

“No, he could tell if I was lying. Besides, he'd make it out as a check. Grandfather wouldn't give me cash. But I can bring you fifty tomorrow, maybe even sixty. Won't that help some?”

“Bring it,” Ligeia said, “but it's not nearly enough, babe. Not nearly.”

It was only when the tardy bell rang that I understood what Ligeia was telling me.

Don't worry. It should be safe
.

Should be
, not will be, she'd told me that Sunday at Panther Creek. The Visible Man. That was the name of the human model Grandfather gave Bill and me one Christmas. Inside the clear-plastic exterior was a human heart with red arteries and blue veins branching out into head and torso. As my heart raced, it was as if I too were transparent, the blue and red strands wrapped like tentacles around my heart.

The bell rang for first period. I wasn't certain I could get up.
But she can take care of it,
I reassured myself.
That's what she was saying. It's just getting the money
. I opened my backpack, took out pen and paper and wrote “Are you sure about your ‘trouble'? Maybe you are just late. Eugene.” I folded the note and walked up the hall to Ligeia's locker and slid it in the door hinge.

At lunchtime Ligeia was waiting for me in front of the cafeteria.

“Yes, I'm sure, and you and Bill have to help me,” she said, looking around to make sure no one heard. “He can get money out of his account, right?”

“Yes.”

“How far away is his college?”

“Three hours.”

“Call him and let him know,” she said. “We'll meet at seven tonight, at the creek.”